I recently read an
interview
with Jeff Carroll, the writer and producer of this
independent film
‘Gold Digger Killer’ who is a very impressive young man
and reading his
words has raised my appreciation for him, his film, and
what he was
attempting to accomplish with this movie of his. That
doesn’t mean that
I’m going to go light on the brother when examining
‘Gold Digger
Killer’, just that I respect and appreciate the message
that he was
trying to put across, less so the way it actually came
across.

Any film that opens with
some
woman sitting on a toilet, distraught because she’s
pregnant and
holding bent clothes hanger should be a clear indication
that we’re not
gearing up for a light breezy Sunday ride in the park.
This scene is
merely conversation fodder for three women who are
sitting in an
abortion clinic. Shante is in for her fifth, count ‘em,
fifth abortion
while getting support from her girls Shaniqua and Imani
who happens to
have the car. Now I have no idea how much condoms and /
or birth
control pills cost but it’s gotta be a more economical
birth control
solution than abortions. Anyway, the ladies are giving
Imani a hard
time because her whip is jacked, her clothes are suspect
and she’s
always broke. Her girls consider Imani’s plight
self-inflicted since
she could be rolling with a baller which would fix all
of her financial
troubles, but instead she sticks with her law school
attending, job
no-having, wacky device inventing boyfriend and seems to
be more than
happy with him.

Oh well. With hoochies in
one
ear and a broke down ride hollering in her other ear,
Imani gets
completely fed up with her broke ass boyfriend and his
pointless (for
the moment) magical remote door unlocking invention and
goes out baller
hunting. On this fateful evening Imani meets the high
rolling Flip at a
club and agrees to go out with him hopefully ending her
financial woes.
Bad move because once girlfriend gets to the hotel for
the ‘date’ she gets
all GHB’d up and gang raped for her trouble.
Unfortunately for these
suckaz, they picked the wrong one. At first it started
out as simple
revenge, but

with Imani becoming
increasingly cracked mentally, a dude simply asking for
directions is
liable to get an armor piercing bullet through the
brain. Obviously
shooting people in the head is against the law in most
states and goofy
policeman Kareem is being sent undercover to flush out
the ‘Gold Digger
Killer’. Thing is that Kareem is the anti-player with a
jacked up ride
and negative game, and there is a side story to this
flick describing how
he would like to be a player because he feels this is
the only way he
can get a woman’s attention. With the body count getting
really high
and Kareem’s superiors applying mad pressure to close
the case, these
two are on a collision course. Gold Digger’s and playa’s
alike had
better WATCH OUT!

Actually in this movie
Imani is
really killing the Gold as opposed to the diggers but
‘Gold Killaz’
just doesn’t have any kind of ring to it. There’s so
much more to ‘Gold
Digger Killer’ than Imani walking around straight
blasting fools as the
film largely deals with the modern urban concepts of
love and dating.
We are a witness to various groups talking about the
down sides of
playa’s and Gold Diggers, talk shows talking about the
subject, poets
espousing on the subject at hand and comedians cracking
jokes about
Gold Diggers. Most of these are separate entities from
the film itself
and this takes away from what the film does best which
is watching
Imani play Ms. 45 as she descends deeper and deeper into
a crazed
insanity.

Technically speaking ‘Gold
Digger Killer’ suffers from a lot of the things we see
in low bud indi
films with spotty sound in some scenes, some
inconsistent lighting and
shaky editing. The biggest problem though, as cute as
she may be, is
that Shatara Curry as Imani isn’t much of an actress.
Hers was a
character that was supposed traverse a gamut of emotions
from loyal
girlfriend, to fed up girlfriend, to distraught rape
victim, to crazed
murderous lunatic but the only emotion Ms. Curry could
offer up was
varying degrees of benign indifference. Actually she was
way more
pissed off that her boyfriend didn’t have a job than she
was at being
drugged and gang raped. Still I was able to adjust to
her performance,
partly because she is really good looking and because
you just accepted
this is nature of the character she was portraying.
However it seemed
at the outset that there was going to be more of a
relationship between
Imani and Kareem, but this never materialized and
despite the flaws of
the film, I was still really starting to get into it,
but it almost
just ended without warning. It just felt like there was
something more
that was supposed to happen. I’m never one to champion
that any movie
be longer than it need be, but it felt like another 10
minutes or so
would have done ‘Gold Digger Killer’ some good.

‘Gold Digger Killer’ was
an
interesting film with some important things to say but
it felt like it
departed from the core of the film to often to lay some
forced morality
on us when it would have been better if it could have
integrated this more into the story itself. This would
have made the narrative flow
much more smoothly and left more room to develop the
principle
characters. Still an interesting watch though it
probably could have
been better constructed.